Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

A fiction writer, screenwriter, and columnist—with a side gig as a product marketing manager for Baidu, the Chinese web giant—Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) has published fiction in venues such as Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, and ZUI Found. Liu Cixin, China’s most prominent science fiction author, praised Chen’s debut novel, The Waste Tide (2013), as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.” Chen has garnered numerous literary awards, including Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award and China’s Galaxy (Yinhe) and Nebula (Xingyun) Awards. In English translation, he has been featured in markets such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Interzone, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. “The Fish of Lijiang” won a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2012, and “The Year of the Rat” was selected by Laird Barron for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One.

The three stories collected here, “The Year of the Rat,” “The Fish of Lijiang,” and “The Flower of Shazui,” showcase Chen’s unique aesthetic of melding a global, post-cyberpunk sensibility with China’s traditions and complex historical legacy. By turns cynical, hopeful, playful, and didactic, Chen captures the zeitgeist of contemporary China, a culture going through a shocking transition and transformation. For more on how Chinese science fiction reflects this aspect of the Chinese experience, see Chen’s essay, “The Torn Generation,” at the end of this book.

A native of Shantou, Guangdong Province, and a graduate of Peking University, one of the China’s most elite colleges, Chen speaks the Shantou topolect as well as Cantonese, Mandarin, and English (the spelling of his English name [“Chan”] reflects the Cantonese pronunciation). A language virtuoso, he has written speculative fiction stories in Classical Chinese—a feat akin to a contemporary English writer composing a story in the language of Chaucer—as well as Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese. The linguistic divisions and diversity of his native land provide both backdrop and metaphor for his novel The Waste Tide, which I’m translating into English. “The Flower of Shazui” is set in the same universe as The Waste Tide and offers a glimpse into that world.

THE YEAR OF THE RAT

It’s getting dark again. We’ve been in this hellhole for two days, but we haven’t even seen a single rat’s hair.

My socks feel like greasy dishrags, so irritating that I want to punch someone. My stomach is cramping up from hunger, but I force my feet to keep moving. Wet leaves slap me in the face like open hands. It hurts.

I want to return the biology textbook in my backpack to Pea and tell him, This stupid book has eight hundred seventy-two pages. I also want to give him back his pair of glasses, even though it’s not heavy, not heavy at all.

Pea is dead.

The Drill Instructor said that the insurance company would pay his parents something. He didn’t say how much.

Pea’s parents would want something to remember him by. So I had taken the glasses out of his pocket and that goddamned book out of his waterproof backpack. Maybe this way his parents would remember how their son was a good student, unlike the rest of us.

Pea’s real name is Meng Xian. But we all called him “Pea” because one, he was short and skinny like a pea sprout, and two, he was always joking that the friar who experimented with peas, Gregor “Meng-De-Er” Mendel, was his ancestor.

Here’s what they said happened: When the platoon was marching across the top of the dam of the abandoned reservoir, Pea noticed a rare plant growing out of the cracks in the muddy concrete at the edge of the dam. He broke formation to collect it.

Maybe it was his bad eyesight, or maybe that heavy book threw him off balance. Anyway, the last thing everyone saw was Pea, looking really like a green pea, rolling, bouncing down the curved slope of the side of the dam for a hundred meters and more, until finally his body abruptly stopped, impaled on a sharp branch sticking out of the water.

The Drill Instructor directed us to retrieve the body and wrap it in a body bag. His lips moved for a bit, then stopped. I knew what he wanted to say—we’d all heard him say it often enough—but he restrained himself. Actually, I kind of wanted to hear him say it.

You college kids are idiots. You don’t even know how to stay alive.

He’s right.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s Black Cannon. He smiles at me apologetically. “Time to eat.”

I’m surprised at how friendly Black Cannon is toward me. Maybe it’s because when Pea died, Black Cannon was walking right by him. And now he feels sorry that he didn’t grab Pea in time.

I sit next to the bonfire to dry my socks. The rice tastes like crap mixed with the smell from wet socks baking by the fire.

Goddamn it. I’m actually crying.

The first time I spoke to Pea was at the end of last year, at the university’s mobilization meeting. A bright red banner hung across the front of the auditorium: “It’s honorable to love the country and support the army; it’s glorious to protect the people and kill rats.” An endless stream of school administrators took turns at the podium to give speeches.

I sat next to Pea by coincidence. I was an undergraduate majoring in Chinese literature; he was a graduate student in the biology department. We had nothing in common except neither of us could find jobs after graduation. Our files had to stay with the school while we hung around for another year, or maybe even longer.

In my case, I had deliberately failed my Classical Chinese exam so I could stay in school. I hated the thought of looking for a job, renting an apartment, getting to work at nine A.M. just so I could look forward to five P.M., dealing with office politics, etc., etc. School was much more agreeable: I got to download music and movies for free; the cafeteria was cheap (ten yuan guaranteed a full stomach); I slept until afternoon every day and then played some basketball. There were also pretty girls all around—of course, I could only look, not touch.

To be honest, given the job market right now and my lack of employable skills, staying in school was not really my “choice.” But I wasn’t going to admit that to my parents.

As for Pea, because of the trade war with the Western Alliance, he couldn’t get a visa. A biology student who couldn’t leave the country had no job prospects domestically, especially since he was clearly the sort who was better at reading books than hustling.

I had no interest in joining the Rodent-Control Force. As they continued the propaganda onstage, I muttered under my breath, “Why not send the army?”

But Pea turned to me and started to lecture. “Don’t you know that the situation on the border is very tense right now? The army’s role is to protect the country against hostile foreign nations, not to fight rats.”

Who talks like that? I decided to troll him a bit. “Why not send the local peasants, then?”

“Don’t you know that grain supplies are tight right now? The work of the peasantry is to grow food, not to fight rats.”

“Why not use rat poison? It’s cheap and fast.”

“These are not common rats, but Neorats™. Common poisons are useless.”

“Then make genetic weapons, the kind that will kill all the rats after a few generations.”

“Don’t you know that genetic weapons are incredibly expensive? Their mission is to act as a strategic deterrent against hostile foreign nations, not to fight rats.”

I sighed. This guy was like one of those telephone voice menus, with only a few phrases that he used all the time. Trolling him wasn’t any fun.

“So you think the job of college graduates is to fight rats?” I said, smiling at him.

Pea seemed to choke, and his face turned red. For a while, he couldn’t say anything in response. Then he turned to clichés like “the country’s fate rests on every man’s shoulders.” But finally he did give a good reason: “Members of the Rodent-Control Force are given food and shelter, with guaranteed jobs to be assigned after discharge.”

The platoon has returned to the town to be resupplied.

In order to discourage desertion, all the students in the Rodent-Control Force are assigned to units operating far from their homes. We can’t even understand one another’s dialects, so everyone has to curl his tongue to speak Modern Standard Mandarin.

I mail Pea’s book and glasses to his parents. I try to write a heartfelt letter to them, but the words refuse to come. In the end, I write only, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

But the postcard I write to Xiaoxia is filled with dense, tiny characters. I think about her long, long legs. This is probably my twenty-third letter to her already.

I find a store to recharge my phone and text my parents at home. When we’re operating in the field, most of the time we get no signal.

The shop owner takes my one yuan and grins at me. The people of this town have probably never seen so many college graduates (though right now we’re covered in dirt and not looking too sharp). A few old men and old women smile at us and give us thumbs-ups—but maybe only because they think we’re pumping extra money into the town’s economy. As I think about Pea, I want to give them my middle finger.

After the Drill Instructor takes care of Pea’s funeral arrangements, he takes us to a cheap restaurant. “We’re still about twenty-four percent away from accomplishing our quota,” he says.

No one answers him. Everyone is busy shoveling rice into his mouth as quickly as possible.

“Work hard, and let’s try to win the Golden Cat Award, okay?”

Still no one answers him. We all know that the award is linked to the bonus paid to the Drill Instructor.

The Drill Instructor slams the table and gets up. “You want to be a bunch of lazy bums all your life, is that it?”

I grab my rice bowl, thinking that he’s going to flip the table.

But he doesn’t. After a moment, he sits down and continues to eat.

Someone whispers, “Do you think our detector is broken?”

Now everyone starts talking. Most are in agreement with the sentiment. Someone offers a rumor that some platoon managed to use their detector to find deposits of rare earth metals and gas fields. They stopped hunting for rats and got into the mining business, solving the unemployment problem of the platoon in one stroke.

“That’s ridiculous,” the Drill Instructor says. “The detector follows the tracer elements in the blood of the rats. How can it find gas fields?” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “If we follow the flow of the water, I’m sure we’ll find them.”

The first time I saw the Drill Instructor, I knew I wanted to hit him.

As we lined up for the first day of boot camp, he paced before us, his face dour, and asked, “Who can tell me why you’re here?”

After a while, Pea hesitantly raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“To protect the motherland,” Pea said. Everyone burst out in laughter. Only I knew that he was serious.

The Drill Instructor didn’t change his expression. “You think you’re funny? I’m going to award you ten push-ups.” Everyone laughed louder.

But that stopped soon enough. “For the rest of you, one hundred push-ups!”

As we gasped and tried to complete the task, the Drill Instructor slowly paced among us, correcting our postures with his baton.

“You’re here because you’re all failures! You lived in the new dorms the taxpayers built, ate the rice the peasants grew, enjoyed every privilege the country could give you. Your parents spent their coffin money on your tuition. But in the end, you couldn’t even find a job, couldn’t even keep yourselves alive. You’re only good for catching rats! Actually, you’re even lower than rats. Rats can be exported for some foreign currency, but you? Why don’t you look in the mirror at your ugly mugs? What are your real skills? Let me see: chatting up girls, playing computer games, cheating on tests. Keep on pushing! You don’t get to eat unless you finish.”

I gritted my teeth as I did each push-up. I thought, If someone would just get a revolt started, I’m sure all of us together can whip him.

Everyone else thought the exact same thing, so nothing happened.

Later, when we were eating, I kept on hearing the sound of chopsticks knocking against bowls because our hands and arms were all trembling. One recruit, so sunburned that his skin was like dark leather, couldn’t hold his chopsticks steady and dropped a piece of meat on the ground.

The Drill Instructor saw. “Pick it up and eat it.”

But the recruit was stubborn. He stared at the Drill Instructor and didn’t move.

“Where do you think your food comes from? Let me explain something to you: the budget for your food is squeezed out of the defense budget. So every grain of rice and every piece of meat you eat comes from a real soldier going hungry.”

The recruit muttered, “Who cares?”

Pa-la! The Drill Instructor flipped over the table in front of me. Soup, vegetables, rice covered all of us.

“Then none of you gets to eat.” The Drill Instructor walked away.

From then on that recruit became known as Black Cannon.

The next day, they sent in the “good cop,” the district’s main administrator. He began with a political lesson. Starting with a quote from The Book of Songs (tenth century BC) (“rat, oh, rat, don’t eat my millet”), he surveyed the three-thousand-year history of the dangers posed to the common people by rat infestations. Then, drawing on contemporary international macro-politico-economic developments, he analyzed the unique threat posed by the current infestation and the necessity of complete eradication. Finally, he offered us a vision of the hope and faith placed in us by the people: “It’s honorable to love the country and support the army; it’s glorious to protect the people and kill rats.”

We ate well that day. After alluding to the incident from the day before, the administrator criticized the Drill Instructor. He noted that we college graduates were “the best of the best, the future leaders of our country,” and that instruction must be “fair, civil, friendly” and emphasize “technique,” not merely rely on “simplistic violence.”

To close, the administrator wanted to take some photos with all of us. We lined up in a single rank, goose-stepping. The administrator held up a rope that the tips of all our feet had to touch, to show how orderly we could march.

We follow the flow of the water. The Drill Instructor is right. We see signs of droppings and paw prints.

It’s getting colder now. We’re lucky that we’re operating in the south. I can’t even imagine making camp up north, where it’s below freezing. The official news is relentlessly upbeat: the Rodent-Control Force units in several districts have already been honorably discharged and have been assigned good jobs with a few state-owned enterprises. But among the lucky names in the newsletter I don’t recognize anyone I know. No one else in the platoon does, either.

The Drill Instructor holds up his right fist. Stop. Then he spreads out his five fingers. We spread out and reconnoiter.

“Prepare for battle.”

Suddenly I’m struck by how ridiculous this is. If this kind of slaughter—like a cat playing with mice—can be called a “battle,” then someone like me who has no ambition, who lives more cowardly than a lapdog, can be a “hero.”

A gray-green shadow stumbles among the bushes. Neorats are genetically modified to walk upright, so they are slower than regular rats. We joke among ourselves that it’s a good thing they didn’t use Jerry—of Tom and Jerry—as the model.

But this Neorat is on all fours. The belly is swollen, which further limits its movement. Is the rat preg—ah, no. I see the dangling penis.

Now it’s turning into a farce. A bunch of men with steel weapons stalk a potbellied rat. In complete silence, we slowly inch across the field. Suddenly the rat leaps forward and rolls down a hill and disappears.

We swear in unison and rush after it.

At the bottom of the hill is a hole in the ground. In the hole are thirty, forty rats with swollen bellies. Most are dead. The one that just jumped in is still breathing heavily, chest heaving.

“A plague?” the Drill Instructor asks. No one answers. I think of Pea. If he were here, he would know.

Chi. A spear pierces the belly of the dying rat. It’s from Black Cannon. He grins as he pulls the spear back, slicing the belly open like a ripe watermelon.

Everyone gasps. Inside this male rat’s belly are more than a dozen rat fetuses: pink, curled up like a dish of shrimp cocktail around the intestines. A few men are having dry heaves. Black Cannon, still grinning, lifts his spear again.

“Stop,” the Drill Instructor says. Black Cannon backs off, laughing and twirling his spear.

The Neorats were engineered to limit their reproductive capacity: for every one female rat born, there would be nine male rats. The idea had been to control the population size to keep up their market value.

But now it looks like the measures are failing. The males before us died because their abdominal cavity could not support the fetuses. But how could they be pregnant in the first place? Clearly their genes are trying to bypass their engineered boundaries.

I remember another possible explanation, something Xiaoxia told me long ago.

Even though I’d had Li Xiaoxia’s phone number in my handset for four years, I never called her. Every time I took it out, I lost the courage to push the CALL button.

That day, I was packing for boot camp when I suddenly heard Xiaoxia’s faint voice as though coming from far away. I thought I was hallucinating until I saw that I had butt-dialed her. I grabbed the phone in a panic.

“Hey,” she said.

“Uh…”

“I hear you’re about to go kill some rats.”

“Yeah. I can’t find a job…”

“Why don’t I take you out to dinner? I feel bad that we’ve been classmates for four years and I hardly know you. It’ll be your farewell meal.”

Rumor had it that luxury cars were always parked below her dorm, waiting to pick her up. Rumor had it that she went through men like a girl trying on dresses.

That night, as we sat across from each other eating bowls of fried rice with beef, her face devoid of makeup, I finally understood. She really had a way of capturing a man’s soul.

We wandered around the campus. As we passed the stray cats, the classrooms, the empty benches, suddenly I missed the school, and it was because of memories I wished I had made with her.

“My dad raised rats, and now you’re going to kill rats,” she said. “In the Year of the Rat you’re going to fight rats. Now that’s funny.”

“Are you going to work with your father after graduation?” I asked.

She was dismissive of the suggestion. In her eyes, the business of raising rats was not all that different from working on a contract manufacturing assembly line or in a shirt factory. We still didn’t control the key technologies. The embryos all had to be imported. After the farm workers raised them, they went through a stringent quality-control process, and those that passed were exported, implanted with a set of programmed behaviors overseas, and then sold to the wealthy as luxury pets.

All that our country, the world’s factory, had to offer was a lot of cheap labor in the least technology-intensive phase of the operation.

“I heard the escaped rats had their genes messed with,” Li Xiaoxia said.

She went on to explain that just like how some contract manufacturers had tried to produce shanzhai iPhones by reverse engineering and messing with the software, so some rat farm owners were trying to reverse engineer and mess with the genes in their rats. Their goal was to raise the ratio of females and the survival rate of babies. Otherwise their profit margin was too low.

“They say that this time the rats didn’t escape,” she continued, “but were released by the farm owners. It was their way of putting pressure on certain branches of the government to gain more handouts for their industry.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt so ignorant.

“But that’s just one set of rumors,” she said. “Others say that the mass escape was engineered by the Western Alliance as a way to put pressure on our country in the trade negotiations. The truth is ever elusive.”

I looked at the young woman before me: beautiful and smart. She was way out of my league.

“Send me a postcard,” she said. Her light laugh broke me out of my reverie.

“Eh?”

“To let me know you’re safe. Don’t underestimate the rats. I’ve seen them…”

She never finished her sentence.

From time to time, I feel many bright eyes are hidden in the dark, observing us, analyzing us, day or night. I think I’m going a little crazy.

By the bank of the river, we discover eighteen nests—low, cylindrical structures about two meters in diameter. Several physics majors squat around one, discussing the mechanical structure of interweaving sticks. On top is a thick layer of leaves, as though the makers wanted to take advantage of the waxy surfaces of the leaves to keep water out.

“I’ve seen primitive tribal villages like this on the Discovery Channel,” one of the men says. We all look at him oddly.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. I squat down, considering the trails of tiny paw prints that connect the nests to one another and the river, like an inscrutable picture. Do the rats have agriculture? Do they need settlements? Why did they abandon them?

Black Cannon laughs coldly. “You need to stop thinking they’re people.”

He’s right. The rats are not people. They’re not even real rats. They’re just carefully designed products—actually, products that failed quality assurance.

I notice something strange about the paw prints. Most seem smaller than usual and only lead away from the nests. But in front of each nest there is one set that is bigger in stride length and deeper, with a long drag mark down the middle. The bigger trails only go into the nests but don’t come out.

“These are”—I try to keep my voice from shaking—“birthing rooms.”

“Sir!” A man stumbles over. “You have to see this.”

We follow him to a tree. Underneath there’s a tower made from carefully stacked rocks. There’s a sense of proportion and aesthetics in the pattern of their shapes and colors. From the tree, eighteen dead male rats hang, their bellies open like unzipped sacks.

A light layer of white sand is spread evenly around the tree. Countless tiny prints can be seen in the sand, surrounding the tree in ever-widening rings. I imagine the ceremonial procession and the mystical rituals. It must have been as wondrous as the scene in Tiananmen Square, when the flag is raised on National Day.

“Oh, come on! This is the twenty-first century. Man has been to the moon! Why are we using these pieces of scrap metal?” Pea, his head now shaven so that he looked even more like a pea, stood up and protested.

“That’s right,” I echoed. “Isn’t the government always talking about modernizing defense? We should have some high-tech toys.” Others in the barracks joined in.

“AT-TEN-TION!”

Complete silence.

“High-tech toys?” the Drill Instructor asked. “For the likes of you? You college kids don’t even know how to hold a pair of chopsticks straight. If I give you a gun, the first thing you’ll do is shoot your own nuts off! Now pack up. We’re mustering in five minutes for a twenty-kilometer march.”

We were issued the following kit: a collapsible short spear (the head could be disassembled into a dagger), an army knife with a serrated blade, a utility belt, a compass, waterproof matches, rations, and a canteen. The Drill Instructor had no faith we could handle anything more advanced.

As if to prove his point, at the end of the practice march, three of us were injured. One fell and sat on the blade of his knife and became the first to be discharged from our platoon. I don’t think he did it on purpose—that would have required too much dexterity.

As we neared the end of training period, I saw anxiety in most eyes. Pea couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning every night and making the bed squeak. By then I had gotten used to life without TV, without the Internet, without 7-Eleven, but each time I thought about the idea of impaling a warm, flesh-and-blood body with a carbon fiber spear, my stomach churned.

There were exceptions, of course.

Whenever one of us passed the training room, we could see Black Cannon’s sweaty figure practicing with his spear. He assigned himself extra drills, and constantly sharpened his knife with a grindstone. Someone who knew him from before told us that he was a quiet kid in school, the sort that got bullied by others. Now he seemed like a bloodthirsty butcher.

Six weeks later, we had our first battle, which lasted a total of six minutes and fourteen seconds.

The Drill Instructor had us surround a small copse. Then he gave the order to charge. Black Cannon went in first. Pea and I looked at each other, hesitated, and brought up the rear. By the time the two of us got to the scene, only a pool of blood and some broken limbs were left. They told me that Black Cannon alone was responsible for eight kills. He chose to keep one of the corpses.

At the meeting afterward, the Drill Instructor commended Black Cannon and criticized “a small number of lazy individuals.”

Black Cannon skinned his trophy. But he didn’t properly cure it, so the skin soon began to rot and smell and became full of maggots. Finally his bunkmate burned it one day when he was out.

Morale is low.

It’s not clear what’s worse—that the rats have figured out how to bypass the artificial limits on their breeding capacity, or that they have demonstrated signs of intelligence: construction of structures, hierarchical society, even religious worship.

My paranoia is getting worse. The woods are full of eyes, and the grass is full of whispers.

It’s night. I give up on trying to sleep and crawl out of the tent.

The early winter stars are so clear that I think I can see all the way to the end of the universe. The sound of a lone insect pierces the silence. My heart clenches with a nameless sorrow.

Sha! I turn around at the sound. A rat is standing erect on its hind legs about five meters away, like another soldier missing home.

I duck down for the knife in my boot sheath. The rat crouches down, too. Our eyes remain locked. The second my hand touches the knife, the rat turns and disappears into the woods. I grab the knife and follow.

Normally I should be able to catch it in about thirty seconds. But tonight, I just can’t seem to close the distance between us. From time to time, it even turns around to see if I’m keeping up. This infuriates me.

The air is full of a sweet, rotting smell. I take a break in a small clearing. I feel dizzy. The trees around me sway and twist, glistening oddly in the starlight.

Pea walks out of the woods. He’s wearing his glasses, which ought to be thousands of kilometers away in his parents’ possession. His body is whole, without that hole in the chest from that tree branch.

I turn around and see my parents. My dad is wearing his old suit, and my mom is in her plain dress. They’re smiling. They look younger, their hair still black.

Tears roll down my face. I don’t need logic. I don’t need sense.

The Drill Instructor finds me before I die of hypothermia. He tells me that I have enough tears and mucus on my face to fill a canteen.

Pea finally said something meaningful. “Living is so…”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Tiring? Good? Stupid? You could fill it in however you wanted. That was why I said it was meaningful. Compared to his old way of talking, this new style was forceful, to the point, and left plenty of room for imagination. I admit it—all those literary criticism classes did teach me something.

For me, living was so… unbelievable. Half a year ago, I never imagined that I would get to bathe only once a week, that I’d be sleeping with lice in the mud, that I’d fight other men my age for a few stale wowotou biscuits, that I’d tremble with excitement at the sight of blood.

Human beings are far more adaptable than we imagine.

If I hadn’t joined the Rodent-Control Force, where would I be now? Probably wasting my time on the Internet all day, or maybe staying at home with my parents so we could sit around and drive one another nuts, or maybe carousing with a gang of social misfits and wreaking havoc.

But today, when the Drill Instructor gave the order, I was out there, waving my spear like a real hunter, chasing rats with their furs of all different colors. The rats were stumbling on their hind legs, designed more for cuteness than function, and screamed in their desperation. I heard that rats certified for export were given further surgical modifications so they could vocalize better. I imagined those rats screaming, in English, “No!” or “Don’t!” and then looking down as the spear impaled their bellies.

Eventually the platoon developed an unwritten code. After a battle, every man handed the Drill Instructor the tails of the rats he had killed so a tally could be made. The records were supposed to influence what jobs we’d be recommended for after discharge.

They knew just how to motivate us; this was just like final exams and posting scores.

Black Cannon got the most commendations. His kill figure was probably already in the four digits, far ahead of anyone else. My own record was below average, barely passing, not unlike in college. Pea was at the very bottom. If I didn’t help him out now and then by handing him a few tails, he would have zero kills.

The Drill Instructor pulled me aside. “Listen, you’re Pea’s friend. Straighten him out.”

I found Pea behind a pile of leaves. I made a lot of noise to give him a chance to put away the pictures of his parents and to wipe away the tears and mucus on his face.

“Homesick?”

He nodded, hiding his swollen eyes from me.

I pulled out a photograph from my inner pocket. “I think about home, too.”

He put on his glasses and examined the picture. “Your parents are so young.”

“This was taken years ago.” I looked at my father’s suit and my mother’s dress, still new looking. “I guess I’m not much of a son. All these years, all I’ve done is make them worry. I never even helped them take a new picture.” My nose felt itchy.

“You know about macaque monkeys?” Pea asked. It was impossible to follow Pea’s thoughts. His mind was like a wire mesh, and ideas traveled across it by jumping. “Scientists discovered mirror neurons in their brains, too. So like humans, they can understand how other monkeys feel and think. They have a mirror in their minds for empathy. You understand?”

I didn’t.

“Empathy. You can always say something that gets me right where I need it. So I think you must have an excess of mirror neurons.”

I punched him lightly. “You calling me a monkey?”

He didn’t laugh. “I want to go home.”

“Don’t be stupid. The Drill Instructor would never give permission. And it will look terrible in your file. How will you ever find a job?”

“I just can’t do it.” Pea stared at me, speaking slowly. “I think the rats didn’t do anything wrong. They’re just like us, doing the best they can in this world. But our role is to chase them, and their role is to be chased. If we swapped roles, it would make no difference.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just put my hand on his shoulder.

On the way back to camp, I bumped into Black Cannon. He smirked at me. “Playing therapist for that sissy?”

I gave him the finger.

“Be careful that you don’t drown along with him,” he called out.

I tried to use my mirror neurons to understand what Black Cannon was thinking and feeling. I failed.

The Drill Instructor stares at the map and the detector, looking thoughtful.

According to the detector, a large pack of rats is moving toward the edge of our district. At the rate we’re marching, we should be able to catch them in twelve hours. If we can kill them all, we will have completed our quota. Yes, we’ll be honorably discharged. We’ll have jobs. We’ll go home for New Year’s.

But there’s a problem. Regulations say that Rodent-Control Force units may not cross district borders for kills. The idea is to prevent units from overly aggressive competition, stealing kills from one another.

The Drill Instructor turns to Black Cannon. “You think we can contain the battle so that the whole operation is within our district?”

Black Cannon nods. “I guarantee it. If we end up crossing district lines, the rest of you can have all my tails.”

We laugh.

“Fine. Let’s get ready to leave at eighteen hundred hours.”

I find a landline public phone at a convenience store. First I call my mom. When she hears that I might be coming home soon, she’s so happy she can’t speak. I hang up after a few more sentences because I’m afraid she’ll cry. Then I dial another number before I can stop myself.

Li Xiaoxia.

She has no idea who I am. Undaunted, I recount our entire history until she remembers.

She’s now working at a foreign company’s Chinese branch: nine to five, plenty of money. Next year she might go overseas to take some classes at company expense. She seems distracted.

“Have you gotten my postcards?”

“Yeah, sure.” She hesitates. “Well, the first few. Then I moved.”

“I’m about to be discharged,” I say.

“Ah, good. Good. Stay in touch.”

I refuse to give up. “Do you remember how when we parted, you told me to be careful of the rats? You said you had seen them. What did you see?”

A long and awkward silence. I hold my breath until I’m about to faint. “I don’t remember,” she says. “Nothing important.”

I regret the money I wasted on that call.

Numbly I stare at the scrolling ticker on the bottom of the static-filled TV screen in the convenience store: “The rodent-control effort is progressing well.” “The Western Alliance has agreed to a new round of trade talks concerning the escalating tension with our country.” “Employment opportunities for new college graduates are trending up.”

Well, even though the rats have now bypassed the limits on their reproductive rates, our quota hasn’t been adjusted in response. It makes no sense, but I don’t care. It looks like we’ll have jobs, and the export numbers will go up again. It doesn’t seem like what we’re doing here matters.

It’s just like what Xiaoxia said: “They say that…” “Others say that…” It’s just rumors and guesses. Who knows what really happens behind closed doors?

No single factor means anything. Everything has to be contextualized. There are too many hidden relationships, too many disguised opportunities for profit, too many competing concerns. This is the most complicated chess game in the world, the Great Game.

But all I can see is my broken heart.

For the last few days, Pea had been going to the bathroom unusually frequently.

I followed him in secret. I saw him taking out a small metal can with holes punched in the lid. He carefully opened it a crack, threw some crackers inside, and murmured quietly into the can.

I jumped out and held out my hand.

“It was really cute,” he said “Look at the eyes!” He tried to appeal to my mirror neurons.

“This is against regulations!”

“Just let me keep it for a few days,” he begged. “I’ll let it go.” His eyes looked like the baby rat’s, so bright.

Someone as nervous and careless as Pea was no good at keeping secrets. When the Drill Instructor and Black Cannon stood in front of me, I knew the game was up.

“You are sheltering prisoners of war!” Black Cannon said. I wanted to laugh, and Pea was already laughing.

“Stop,” the Drill Instructor said. We stood at attention. “If you can give me a reasonable explanation, I’ll deal with you reasonably.”

I figured that I had nothing to lose, so I came up with an “explanation” on the fly. Black Cannon was so furious when he heard it I thought his nose was going to become permanently twisted.

Pea and I worked together the whole afternoon to dig a hole about two meters deep into the side of a hill. We lined it with a greased tarp. Pea didn’t like my plan, but I told him it was the only way we could escape punishment.

“It’s really smart,” Pea said. “It can even imitate my gestures.” He gave a demonstration. Indeed, the little rat was a regular mimic. I tried to get it to imitate me, but it refused.

“Great,” I said. “Its IQ is approaching yours.”

“I try to see it as just a well-engineered product,” Pea said. “A bundle of modified DNA. But emotionally I can’t accept that.”

We hid downwind from the hole. Pea held a string in his hand. The other end of the string was tied to the leg of the baby rat at the bottom of the hole. I had to keep on reminding Pea to pull the rope once in a while to make the rat cry out piteously. His hands shook. He hated doing it, but I made him. Our futures were at stake here.

My whole idea was founded on guesses. Who knew how these artificial creatures felt about the bonds of kinship? Did adult rats have any child-rearing instincts? How did their new reproductive arrangement—one female mating with multiple males, each of whom then became “pregnant”—affect things?

One male rat appeared. It sniffed the air near the hole as if trying to identify the smell. Then it fell in. I could hear the sound of its claws scratching against the greased tarp. I laughed. Now we had two rats as bait.

The adult male was much louder than the baby rat. If it really had a high IQ, then it should be issuing warnings to its companions.

I was wrong. A second male rat appeared. It came to the side of the trap, seemed to have a conversation with the rats in there, then fell in.

Then came the third, fourth, fifth… After the seventeenth rat fell in, I worried that the hole wasn’t deep enough.

I gave the signal. In a second, men with spears surrounded the trap.

The rats were building a pyramid. The bottom layer consisted of seven rats leaning against the side of the trap. Five rats stood on their shoulders in the next layer. Then three. Two more rats were carrying the baby rat and climbing up.

“Wait!” Pea yelled. Carefully he pulled the string and slowly separated the baby rat from the adult rats carrying it. The minute the baby rat dangled free of the adults, the adult rats screamed—and I heard sorrow in their voices. The pyramid fell apart as the spears plunged down, splattered blood beading against the plastic and rolling down slowly.

In order to rescue a child who was not directly related to them, the rats were willing to sacrifice themselves. Yet we exploited this to get them.

I shivered.

Pea pulled the baby rat back to him. Just as the baby was about to complete this nightmarish journey, a boot came out of nowhere and flattened it against the earth.

Black Cannon.

Pea jumped at him, fists swinging.

Black Cannon was caught off guard, and blood flowed down the corner of his mouth. Then he laughed, grabbed Pea, and lifted his skinny body over his head. He walked next to the trap, filled with blood and gore, and got ready to toss Pea in.

“I think the sissy wants to join his dirty friends.”

“Put him down!” The Drill Instructor appeared and ended the madness.

Because I came up with the plan, I received my first commendation. Three times during his speech, the Drill Instructor mentioned “college education,” but not once sarcastically. Even Black Cannon was impressed with me. He told me when no one was around that all the tails from this battle should be given to me. I accepted, and then gave the tails to Pea.

Of course I knew that nothing would make up for what I took away from Pea.

Farm fields, trees, hills, ponds, roads… we pass like shadows in the night.

During a break, Black Cannon suggests to the Drill Instructor that we divide the platoon in half. He will choose the best fighters and dash ahead while the rest follow slowly. He looks around and then adds, meaningfully, “Otherwise, we might not be able to complete the mission.”

“No,” I say. The Drill Instructor and Black Cannon look at me. “The strength of an army comes from all its members working together. We advance together, we retreat together. None of us is extraneous, and none of us is more important than any others.”

I pause, locking my gaze with the furious Black Cannon. “Otherwise, we’ll be no better than the rats.”

“Good.” The Drill Instructor puts out his cigarette. “We stay together. Let’s go.”

Black Cannon walks by me. He lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “I should have let you roll down the dam with the sissy.”

I freeze.

As Black Cannon walks away, he turns and smirks at me. I’ve seen that curling of the lips before: when he warned me not to drown along with Pea, when he stomped on the baby rat and lifted Pea over his head, when he sliced open the bellies of the male rats.

Black Cannon was next to Pea that afternoon. They said that Pea left the path because he saw a rare plant. But without his glasses, Pea was practically blind.

I should never have believed their lies.

As I stare at Black Cannon’s back, memory surfaces after memory. This is the most difficult journey I’ve ever been on.

“Prepare for battle,” the Drill Instructor says, taking me out of my waking dream. We’ve been marching for ten hours.

In my mind, the only battle that matters in the world is between Black Cannon and me.

It’s dawn again. The battlefield is a dense forest in a valley. The cliffs on both sides are steep and bare. The Drill Instructor’s plan is simple: one squad will move ahead and cut off the rat pack’s path through the valley. The other squads will follow and kill every rat they see. Game over.

I sneak through the trees to join Black Cannon’s squad. I don’t have a plan, except that I don’t want him out of my sight. The forest is dense, and visibility is poor. A faint blue miasma permeates the air. Black Cannon sets the pace for a fast march, and we weave between the trees, among the fog, like ghosts.

He stops abruptly. We follow his finger and see several rats pacing a few meters away. He gestures for us to spread out and surround them. But by the time we get close, the rats have all disappeared. We turn around, and the rats are still just a few meters away.

This happens a few more times. All of us are frightened.

The miasma grows thicker, filled with a strange odor. My forehead is sweaty, and the sweat stings my eyes. I grip my spear tightly, trying to keep up with the squad. But my legs are rubbery. My paranoia is back. Things are watching me in the grass. Whispers in the air.

I’m alone now. All around me is the thick fog. I spin around. Every direction seems full of danger. Desperation fills my head.

Suddenly I hear a long, loud scream in one direction. I rush over but see nothing. I feel something large dash behind me. Another loud, long scream. Then I hear the sound of metal striking against metal, the sound of flesh being ripped apart, heavy breathing.

Then silence, absolute silence.

It’s behind me. I can feel its hot gaze.

I spin around, and it leaps at me through the fog. A Neorat as large as a human, its claws dripping with blood, is on me in a second. My spear pushes its arms against its chest, and we wrestle each other to the ground. Its jaws, full of sharp teeth, snap shut right next to my ear, the stench from its mouth making it impossible for me to breathe. I want to kick it off me with my legs, but it has me completely pinned against the ground.

I watch, helplessly, as its bloody claws inch toward my chest. I growl with fury, but it sounds like a desperate, loud scream.

The cold claw rips through my uniform. I can feel it against my chest. Then a brief, searing moment of pain as it rips through my skin and muscles. The claw continues down, millimeter by millimeter, toward my heart.

I look up into its face. It’s laughing. The mouth forms a cruel grin, one I’m very familiar with.

Bang. The rat shudders. The claws stop. It turns its head around, confused, trying to find the source of the noise. I gather every ounce of strength in my body and shove its claws away, then smash my spear against its skull.

A muffled thud. It falls against the ground.

I look up past him, and see a bigger, taller rat walking toward me. It’s holding a gun in its hands.

I close my eyes.

“You can all have a real drink tonight,” the Drill Instructor said. He revealed a few cases of beer next to the campfire.

“What’s the occasion?” Pea asked happily. He grabbed a chicken foot out of the big bowl and gnawed on it.

“I think it’s somebody’s birthday today.”

Pea was still for a second. Then he smiled and kept on gnawing his chicken foot. In the firelight I thought I saw tears in his eyes.

The Drill Instructor was in a good mood. “Hey, Pea,” he said, handing Pea another beer, “you’re a Sagittarius. So you ought to be good at shooting. But why is your aim at rats so awful? You must be doing a lot of other kinds of shooting, am I right?”

We laughed until our stomachs cramped up. This was a side of the Drill Instructor we never knew.

The birthday boy ate his birthday noodles and made his wish. “What did you wish for?” the Drill Instructor asked.

“For all of us to be discharged as quickly as possible so that we can go home, get good jobs, and spend time with our parents.”

Everyone went quiet, thinking that the Drill Instructor was going to get mad. But he clapped, laughed, and said, “Good. Your parents didn’t waste their money on you.”

Now everyone started talking at once. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money and buy a big house. Some said they wanted to sleep with a pretty girl from every continent. One said he wanted to be the president. “If you’re going to be the president,” another said, “then I’ll have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Milky Way.”

I saw that the Drill Instructor’s expression was a bit odd. “What do you wish for, sir?”

We all got quiet.

The Drill Instructor poked at the fire with a stick.

“My home village is poor. All of us born there are stupid, not much good at schooling, not like you. As a young man, I didn’t want to work the fields or go to the cities and be a laborer. It seemed so futile. Then someone said, ‘Go join the army. At least you’ll be protecting the country. If you do well, maybe you’ll become a hero, and then you can return home and bring honor to your ancestors.’ I’d always liked war movies and thought it exciting to wear a uniform. So I signed up.

“Poor kids like me knew nothing except how to work hard. Every day, I trained the longest and practiced the most. If there was a dangerous task, I volunteered. If something dirty needed to be done, I did it. What did I do all that for? I just wanted an opportunity to be a hero on the battlefield. It was my only chance to do something with my life, you know? Even if I died, it would be worth it.”

The Drill Instructor paused, sighed. He kept on poking at the fire with his branch. The silence lasted for a long time.

Then he looked up and grinned. “Why are you all quiet? I shouldn’t have ruined the mood.” He threw away his branch. “Sorry. I’ll sing a song to apologize. It’s an old song. When I first heard it, you weren’t even born yet.”

He was not a good singer, but he sang with his whole heart. The corners of his eyes were wet.

“… Today all I have is my shell. Remember our glory days, when we embraced freedom in the storm? All life we believed we could change the future, but who ever accomplished it…?”

As he sang, the flickering shadows from the fire made him seem even taller, like a bigger-than-life hero. Our applause echoed loudly in the empty wilderness.

“Let me tell you something,” Pea said. He leaned over, sipping from a bottle. “Living is so… like a dream.”

The loud noise of the engine wakes me.

I open my eyes and see the Drill Instructor, his lips moving. But I can’t hear a word over the noise.

I try to get up, but a sharp pain in my chest makes me lie down again. Over my head is a curved metallic ceiling. Then the whole world starts to vibrate and shake, and a sense of weight pushes me against the floor. I’m in a helicopter.

“Don’t move,” the Drill Instructor shouts, leaning close to my ear. “We’re taking you to the hospital.”

My memory is a mess of random scenes from that nightmarish battle. Then I remember the last thing I saw. “That gun… was that you?”

“Tranquilizer.”

I think I’m beginning to understand. “So what happened to Black Cannon?”

The Drill Instructor is silent for a while. “The injury to his head is pretty severe. He’ll probably be a vegetable the rest of his life.”

I remember that night when I couldn’t sleep. I remember Pea, my parents, and…

“What did you see?” I ask the Drill Instructor anxiously. “What did you see on the battlefield?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Then he looks at me. “It’s probably best if you don’t know, either.”

I think about this. If the rats are now capable of chemically manipulating our perceptions, generating illusions to cause us to kill one another, then the war is going to last a long, long time. I remember the screams and the sounds of flesh being torn apart by spears.

“Look!” The Drill Instructor supports me so that I can see through the helicopter cockpit window.

Rats, millions of rats are walking out of fields, forests, hills, villages. Yes, walking. They stand erect and stroll at a steady pace, as though members of the world’s largest tour group. The scattered trickles of rats gather into streams, rivers, flowing seas. Their varicolored furs form grand patterns. There’s a sense of proportion and aesthetics.

The ocean of rats undulates over the withered, sere winter landscape and the identical, boring human buildings, like a new life force in the universe, gently flowing.

“We lost,” I say.

“No, we won,” the Drill Instructor says. “You’ll see soon.”

We land on a military hospital. Bouquets and a wheelchair welcome me, the hero. A pretty nurse pushes me inside. They triage me quickly and then give me a bath. It takes a long time before the water flows clear. Then it’s time to feed me. I eat so quickly that I throw it all up again. The nurse gently pats my back, her gaze full of empathy.

The cafeteria TV is tuned to the news. “Our country has reached preliminary agreement with the Western Alliance concerning the trade dispute. All parties have described it as a win-win…”

On TV, they’re showing the mass migration of rats I saw earlier from the helicopter.

“After thirteen months of continuous, heroic struggle by the entire nation, we have finally achieved complete success in eradicating the rodent threat!”

The camera shifts to a scene by the ocean. A gigantic multicolored carpet is moving slowly from the land into the ocean. As it touches the ocean, it breaks into millions of particles, dissolving in the water.

As the camera zooms in, the Neorats appear like soldiers in a killing frenzy. Crazed, each attacks everything and anything around itself. There’re no more sides, no more organization, no more hint of strategy or tactics. Every Neorat is fighting only for itself, tearing apart the bodies of its own kind, cruelly biting, chewing others’ heads. It’s as if some genetic switch has been flipped by an invisible hand, and their confident climb toward civilization has been turned in a moment into the rawest, most primitive instinct. They collide against one another, strike one another, so that the whole carpet of bodies squirms, tumbles into a river of blood that runs into the sea.

“See, I told you,” the Drill Instructor says.

But the victory has nothing to do with us. This had been planned from the start. Whoever had engineered the escape of the Neorats had also buried the instructions for getting rid of them when their purpose had been accomplished.

Li Xiaoxia was right. Pea was right. The Drill Instructor was also right. We are just like the rats, all of us only pawns, stones, worthless counters in the Great Game. All we can see is just the few grids of the board before us. All we can do is just follow the gridlines in accordance with the rules of the game: Cannon on eighth file to fifth file; Horse on second file to third file. As for the meaning behind these moves, and when the great hand that hangs over us will plunge down to pluck one of us off, nobody knows.

But when the two players in the game, the two sides, have concluded their business, all sacrifices become justified—whether it’s the Neorats or us. I think again of Black Cannon in the woods, and shudder.

“Don’t mention what you saw,” the Drill Instructor says. I know he means the religion of the rats, Black Cannon’s grin, Pea’s death. These things aren’t part of the official story. They’re meant to be forgotten.

I ask the nurse, “Will the migrating rats pass this city?”

“In about half an hour. You should be able to see them from the park in front of the hospital.”

I ask her to take me there. I want to say good-bye to my foes, who never existed.

THE FISH OF LIJIANG

Two fists are before my eyes, bright sunlight reflecting from the backs of the hands.

“Left or right?”

I see myself reaching out with a child’s finger, hesitating, and pointing to the one on the left. The fist flips, opens. Empty.

The fists disappear and reappear.

“One more chance. Left or right?”

I point to the one on the right.

“You’re sure? Want to change your mind?”

My finger hesitates in the air, waving left, then right, like a swimming fish.

“Final answer? Three… two… one.”

My finger stops on the left.

The fist flips, opens. Other than the bright sunlight, the hand is empty.

A dream?

I open my eyes. The sun is bright white and hurts my eyes. I’ve been dozing in this Naxi-style[3] courtyard for who knows how long. I haven’t felt this comfortable in such a long time. The sky is so fucking blue. I stretch until my bones crack.

After ten years, everything here has changed. The only thing that remains the same is the color of the sky.

Lijiang,[4] I’m back. This time, I’m a sick man.

Twenty-four hours ago, I had a multiplicity of identities: an office drone with a strict routine, the master of a gray Ford, the prospective owner of a moldy apartment tucked into a hidden fold of the city, a debt-ridden parasite, etc.

Now I’m just a patient, a patient in need of rehabilitation.

It’s the fault of that damned mandatory physical exam. On the last page of the report were the words, “PNFD II (Psychogenic Neural-Functional Disorder II).” Translated into words normal people can understand, they say that I’m messed up and I must take two weeks off to rehabilitate.

My face flushed, I asked my boss whether I could be exempted. I felt the stares of everyone in the office burning into the back of my neck. Schadenfreude. They were delighted that the “boss’s pet” was shown to be human after all, weak in the head, collapsing under the stress.

I shuddered. That’s office politics for you.

The boss spoke slowly, methodically. “You think I want this? I have to pay for your mandatory vacation! People working at other companies can’t get rehab even if they need it. But the new labor law requires it of us. Our company is a proper globalized business; we have to set an example.… Anyway, if you get worse, your disease will turn into neurosyphilis and infect the rest of us. Better that you leave now, yes?”

Ashamed, I left the boss’s office and cleaned out my desk. I ignored the stares. Keep on looking, you neurosyphilitic assholes. I’ll be back in two weeks, and we’ll see who gets to be assistant manager at the end of the year.

On the airplane, I listened to the snores around me, unable to fall asleep. I’d been dealing with insomnia for more than a month. Actually, I’d been dealing with a lot of things: upset stomach, forgetfulness, headaches, fatigue, depression, loss of libido… maybe it really was time for me to rest for a while.

I flipped through the in-flight magazine. The pictures of the tourist sights around Lijiang were so beautiful they almost seemed fake.

Ten years ago, I had nothing and no cares. Ten years ago, Lijiang was a paradise for those who liked to exile themselves from civilization. (Or to put it less pretentiously, that was where young people who fancied themselves “artists” slept with one another.) Ten years ago, I carried everything I owned on my back (still had some muscles then). A map of the ancient city in my pocket, I wandered through it from morning till midnight, chatted with every woman who was alone, fell asleep to the accompaniment of song and alcohol.

Now I’m back. I have a car, a house—everything a man should have, including erectile dysfunction and insomnia. If happiness and time are the two axes of a graph, then I’m afraid the curve of my life has already passed the apex and is on its inexorable way down to the bottom.

I stay still, thinking of nothing. Sunlight falls from the tops of the high walls into the yard, which smells of Chinese mahogany. I don’t know how much time has passed. My watch, mobile, and any other gadget capable of displaying time have been taken away by the staff of the rehabilitation center.

The ancient city has no computers and no TV. But some of the inhabitants have decided to rent out the space on their foreheads and chests. Tiny LCDs are embedded into their skin, showing all kinds of ads twenty-four hours a day. Like I said, this is no longer the Lijiang I knew.

Strangely, my desire to get better as soon as possible so that I can get back to the office is fading in the sunlight, like the fading smell of the Chinese mahogany.

My stomach growls, once. I decide to go find something to eat. My stomach seems the only way I have left to tell time—oh, also my bladder and the shifting lights in the sky.

The slate-lined street has few pedestrians—this part of the city is reserved for the use of the rehabilitating patients. There are many stray dogs, however: fat, thin, all kinds.

On the flight here I heard a joke. Serious economic criminals, in addition to the death penalty and life imprisonment, can now be sentenced to a third kind of punishment: becoming experimental subjects for consciousness transfer operations in Lijiang so that they can be turned into dogs. Normally, because these experiments often fail, no one volunteers. But the idea of living in Lijiang is so attractive—even as a dog—that many have jumped at the opportunity.

Seeing how these dogs are so obsequious before pretty girls and so nervous before city inspectors, I almost think the joke is reportage.

I finish a bowl of soy chicken, find a café, and sit with a cup of black coffee. I flip through a few books I’ve always been meaning to read (and will never finish) and think about “the meaning of life.”

Is this how you get better? Without any physical therapy, medication, special diet, yoga, yin-yang dynamics, or any other kind of professional care? Is this the meaning of the slogan plastered all over the rehabilitation center: “Healthy Minds, Happy Bodies”?

I have to admit it: I have a great appetite; I’m sleeping well; I’m relaxed; I feel better even than I did ten years ago.

Even my nose, which has been stuffed up for several weeks, can now pick out the fragrance of sachets in a coffee shop. Wait. Sachets?

I lift my head. A girl in a dark green dress is sitting across from me, holding a drink that smells delicious and looking at me with a big smile on her face. This is like the hook for some French film, I think, or maybe a dream, either sweet or terrifying.

“So you’re in marketing?”

The woman and I are walking together in the light of the setting sun. The stone-paved street is bathed in a golden glow. Lovely smells waft from the snack bars.

“Sure. You can also say I’m in sales. How about you? Office lady? Civil service? Police? Teacher?” Then I add a bit of flattery. “Actress?”

“Ha! Keep on guessing.” She seems to enjoy my attempt at humor. “I’m a special-care nurse. Surprised?”

“So even nurses can get sick and need rehab.”

After dinner, we go to a bar. She’s disappointed by the decline in the level of service in Lijiang. “What happened to all the fun people who used to run this place?”

From one of the waiters we find out that the place is now owned by Lijiang Industries (stock code #203845), backed by several wealthy conglomerates. The local owners the woman knew sold because they either could no longer afford to keep the place running or could not afford a new license. Everything is so much more expensive now. But the stock of Lijiang Industries is doing very well.

The ancient city at night is filled with the spirit of consumerism, but we can’t find anywhere we want to go. She has no interest in hearing Naxi folk music played by a robot orchestra: “Sounds like a braying donkey with its balls cut off.” I don’t want to see a folk dance demonstration by a bonfire: “Like a human barbecue.” In the end we decide to lie down on our bellies by the side of the street, watching the little fish swimming in the waterway.

In the waterways of Lijiang live schools of red fish. Whether it’s dawn, dusk, or midnight, you can see them hovering in the water, facing the same direction, lined up like soldiers on a parade ground, ready for inspection. But if you look closer, you’ll see that they aren’t really still. In fact, they’re struggling against the current in order to maintain their position. Once in a while, one or two fish become tired and are pushed out of the formation by the current. But soon, tails fluttering, they fight their way back into place.

It’s been ten years since I last saw them. They, at least, haven’t changed.

“Swim, swim, swim. Before you know it, life is over.” I repeat the same words I said ten years ago. “Just like us,” she says.

“This is the hidden meaning of life,” I say. “At least we still can choose how to live.” I sound so pretentious I want to gag.

“But the reality is that I didn’t choose you, and you didn’t choose me.”

My heart skips a beat. I look at her. I really haven’t thought about inviting her to come back to my hotel; I still don’t feel the return of my libido. This is a misunderstanding.

She begins to laugh.

“I was quoting a song. You don’t know it? Well, I’m pretty beat. Why don’t we meet up again tomorrow? You’re fun.”

“But how do I find you…” I suddenly realize that I don’t have my mobile.

“I’m staying here.” She hands me the card from a hotel. “If you’re too lazy to walk there, just get a dog.”

“A dog?”

“You really don’t know? Any stray dog would do. Take a piece of paper, write down the time and place you want to meet at, and stick it in the dog’s collar. Then swipe the hotel card through the collar.”

“You’re not kidding?”

“You need to read your Lijiang guidebook.”

I don’t know how long I slept.

I think it’s the afternoon of the second day, but the position of the sun tells me it’s morning. Except I have no way of ascertaining that it’s not the morning of the third day, the fourth day, or a morning that comes after a dream that lasts a lifetime.

Maybe that’s the trick to full rehab: just don’t dream about business reports and my boss’s fat face.

I look for a dog. But the dogs here have sharp noses. They can smell the failure on me and run away. I’m forced to buy a packet of yak jerky. I feed a dog—a real son of a bitch—until it’s stuffed. Finally I get it to carry my message.

In case she forgets who I am, I sign the note, “Last Night’s Fish.”

I wander the streets. I enjoy the sun and the idleness. No one here has any sense of time anyway, so she can come whenever she wants to.

I see an old man sitting in a corner with a falcon. The falcon and the man are both full of energy. I go up to them with my camera.

“No pictures!” the old man shouts.

“Five yuan! One dollar!” the falcon shouts in a mixture of Sichuan-accented Mandarin and English.

Fuck! They’re both robots. The city has nothing authentic anymore. I turn around angrily.

“Do you want to know why the sky in Lijiang is so blue? Do you want to hear the legend of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain?” Seeing that I’m about to go away, the old man changes his pitch and even his accent. Now he sounds like a man from urbane Suzhou. “I know everything there is to know about Lijiang. One yuan only for each piece of information.”

Why not? I just want to kill some time. Might as well hear his lies. I take out a coin and stick it into the falcon’s beak. Clink! A panel opens in the falcon’s chest, revealing a pink-glowing keypad.

“To hear why the sky of Lijiang is so blue, press one. To hear the Legend of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, press two.…”

Enough. I press “1.”

“Modern Lijiang relies on condensation control and scatter index standardization. The technology is able to maintain sunny days with probability above ninety-five-point-four-two-six percent. Through microadjustments to the atmospheric particle content, it is able to maintain the hue of the sky between Pantone2975c and 3035c. The system is designed by…”

Damn it. I feel sad. Even the sky, so beautiful it’s like the pristine sky present at Creation, is fake.

“Looking for UFOs?” the woman asks as she puts her hands on my shoulders from behind.

“Can you tell me if anything here is real?” I mutter.

“Sure. There’s you. There’s me. We’re real.”

“Real sick,” I correct her.

“Tell me about yourself. I love getting to know someone.”

We’re now back in the bar. Through the window we can see the fish in the waterway below, swimming, swimming, going nowhere.

“Let’s play a game,” she says. “We take turns guessing facts about the other person. If the guess is right, the other person drinks. If the guess is wrong, the guesser drinks.”

“Sure. We’ll see who gets drunk first.”

“I’ll go first. You work for a big company, right?”

“Ha. My boss’s favorite saying is, ‘We’re a proper, global, modern, big’”—I lower my voice—“‘factory.’”

She giggles.

I can’t remember if I told her anything about my company in the past. But I take a drink anyway.

“Your patients,” I ask, “are all important people, right?” She drinks.

“You’re an important man at your company,” she says. I drink.

“I’ll ask something more interesting,” I say. “You’ve had patients who made passes at you, haven’t you?”

She blushes and drains her glass.

“You must have many girlfriends,” she says. I hesitate for a second, and drink. “Had” is a form of “have,” I tell myself.

“You are not married,” I say.

She smiles, not answering.

I shrug, taking a drink.

Only after I’m done does she lift her glass and drink.

“Not fair! You tricked me,” I say. But I’m happy.

“It’s your own fault for being impatient.”

“Fine, then I’m going to guess that you have insomnia, anxiety, arrhythmia, irregular periods…” I know I’ve been drinking too fast. I know I’m going to regret this, but I can’t stop talking.

She glares at me and drinks. Then she adds, “Whatever symptoms you have, I don’t. Whatever symptoms I have, you don’t.”

“We’re both here, aren’t we?”

She shakes her head. “You think nothing has meaning.”

“That was before I met you,” I say in what I think is a seductive tone. Now I’m just shameless.

She ignores me. “You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you. The world is changing every day. And every day you’re getting older. But there are still so many things you haven’t done. You want to hold on to the sand. But the harder you squeeze, the quicker the sand slips from the cracks between your fingers, until nothing is left…”

Coming from anyone else, the words would just be pop psychology, pseudo intellectualism, cheap spirituality. But somehow, coming from her, they sound like the truth. Every word strikes against my heart, making me wince.

I drink by myself in silence. Her smile begins to multiply: two, three, four of her… I want to ask her something, but my tongue is no longer obeying.

She looks embarrassed. She whispers to me, “You’re drunk. I’ll take you back.”

So I’ve failed again.

It takes a long time for me to remember where I am.

During the time I’m thinking, the sun shifts through six window squares. It marches across three more window squares before I’ve washed away the smell of alcohol on my body and the vomit in the bathroom.

I guess Miss Nurse hasn’t taken good care of this patient. I have a splitting headache.

I don’t want to send a dog after her. Indeed, I’m a bit scared to meet her. Maybe she’s a telepath? It makes sense to have a telepath as a special-care nurse, right? Especially if the patient can no longer speak.

The biggest fear is for someone else to understand what you really fear.

A shar-pei enters my room and barks at me. I take out the slip of paper tucked into its collar.

She wants me to go with her to listen to robots playing Naxi folk music, which she’d described to me as a donkey braying with its balls cut off. She signed her note, “I’m No Telepath.”

Screw you! You bourgeois bitch! I kick the shar-pei. It whimpers.

In the end, curiosity overcomes fear. I wash, get dressed, go to the concert hall. She’s dressed all in yellow. I nod at her.

But she ignores my attempt to remain distant. She walks right up to me, takes my hand in hers, and drags me inside.

“Stop pretending,” she whispers in my ear. I have to struggle to keep from her how aroused I am.

They begin to play. It does sound like a donkey braying. It’s an insult to real Naxi music, the sort I heard ten years ago.

The robots swing back and forth, pretending to play all sorts of Naxi instruments, and recorded music streams from speakers embedded into the seats. The robots are clearly made in China: stiff, ridiculous movements; limited repertoire of gestures; monotonous expressions. Only robot Xuan Ke[5] is made with any kind of care for detail. Once in a while he even acts as though he’s completely absorbed by his performance. I worry that he’ll swing so hard his head falls off.

“I thought you didn’t like donkey-braying,” I whisper into her ear. The fragrance of sachets surrounds me.

“This is one part of our rehabilitation.”

“Yeah, right.”

I try to kiss her. But she dodges out of the way, and my lips meet her fingers.

“Back in your office, on your desk, there’s a tiny gray alarm clock. It’s shaped like a mushroom, and it often runs fast.”

Her tone is calm, but I’m stupefied. That clock was a gift from the company when I won Employee of the Month. How does she know about it?

I lost the drinking game—maybe that was an accident. But this…

I continue to stare at her profile. The donkey-braying music washes over me like a tidal wave. I seem to have also become a robot musician. I strain to play my foolish song of seduction, but she sees through me with no effort. I have nothing in my chest but a mechanical heart made of iron.

We end up in bed together.

She acts as though this is nothing special. But not me. A man is such a strange animal: fear and desire are expressed by the same organ. For the former, he loses control of the organ and it lets out urine; for the latter, he loses control of the organ and it fills with blood.

Is this part of our rehab, too? I can imagine myself mocking her. But I don’t, because I fear how she’ll answer.

“Who are you really?” I can’t help myself.

Her voice is muffled, indistinct. “I’m a nurse. My patient is time.”

In the end she does tell me her story.

She works for a place called “Time Care Unit.” Only the most important men of the business world get to go there.

The old men are like mummies, their bodies plugged full of tubes and wires. Twenty-four hours a day they must be watched and cared for. Every day, all kinds of people come to visit. They dress in sterile biosuits and stand around the beds, communing with the old men, reporting and receiving instructions in silence.

The old men never move. Each of their breaths takes hours. Once in a while, one of them moans like a baby, and someone makes a record of it. Looking at all the biological signs, they should all be considered dead. The numbers shown on their machines never change. But they remain in that place for years, decades.

She tells me that they are receiving “time sense dilation therapy.” She calls them “the living dead.”

The therapy began some twenty years ago. Back then, scientists discovered that by controlling the biological clock of an organism, it was possible to reduce the production of free radicals and slow down aging. But the decay of the mind and its eventual death could not be reversed or halted.

Someone made another discovery: the aging of the mind was intimately connected with the sense of the passage of time. By manipulating certain receptors in the pineal gland, it was possible to slow down one’s sense of time, to dilate it. The body of a person receiving time sense dilation therapy remains in the normal stream of time, but his mind experiences time a hundred, a thousand times slower than the rest of us.

“But what does this have to do with you?” I ask.

“You know that women who live together synchronize their biological rhythms, like menstrual cycles?”

I nod.

“It’s the same thing with us nurses who care for these living dead, day in, day out. Once a year, I have to come to Lijiang to rehabilitate, to remove the effects time dilation has on my body.”

I feel dizzy. Time sense dilation is used on those old men because of the need to maintain stock prices or to delay power struggles among successors. But what if the dilation is applied to a normal person? I try to imagine experiencing a hundred years within a second. But my imagination is not up to the task. To extend time to near infinity is to slow it down until it’s almost still. Then isn’t the mind under such dilation immortal? What’s the need for a body made of flesh?

“Remember what I told you? I didn’t choose you, and you didn’t choose me,” she says, smiling almost apologetically.

I begin to feel anxiety again, as though my fingers are wrapped around a handful of sand, leaking grains.

“You’re the other half of me, cloven by Zeus’s thunderbolt.”

The words sound to me like a curse.

She’s leaving.

She tells me that her rehabilitation period is up.

We sit in the dark. In front of us is the imposing mass of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, its snowy peaks reflecting the silver moonlight. Neither of us speaks.

The donkey-braying music loops again and again in my head.

“Remember that alarm clock on your desk?” she asks.

Although time sense dilation therapy is very expensive, the opposite procedure—time sense compression—is not. The procedure is cheap enough to be commercialized. Several large conglomerates have invested in it, and taking advantage of certain loopholes in China’s labor laws (and the complicity of the government), they’ve been conducting secret trials on Chinese employees of international companies.

That alarm clock is a prototype time sense compressor.

“So we are all lab mice,” I remember mocking myself at her revelation. Even my boss is a mouse—he also has one of those clocks on his desk.

“It doesn’t matter if you know the truth,” she says. “The theoretical basis for time sense compression does not exist.”

“Does not exist?”

“Theoretical physics says it’s impossible, so they had to base it on the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It’s all about intuition.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.” She laughs. “Maybe it’s all nonsense.”

“You’re telling me that my disease, this PNFD II or whatever it’s called, is the result of time sense compression?”

She doesn’t say anything.

But it makes sense. Time passes quicker in my mind than it does in the real world. Every day I’m exhausted. I’m always working overtime. I accomplish so much more in twenty-four hours than others. No wonder the company thinks I’m a model employee.

Clouds drift over and hide the moon, eliminating the reflected light on the snowy peaks. Everything grows darker like after they lower the lights in a theatre.

A bright red laser beam lands on the snowy cliffs—5,600 meters above the sea—now acting as a giant screen. The laser creates shifting patterns, telling an animated tale, the creation of the world. A myth has been bowdlerized to mass entertainment. I’m not in the mood to appreciate it. The dancing lights only make my heart beat irregularly.

Time sense compression is wonderful for improving productivity and GDP. But there are many side effects. The mismatch between subjective time and physical time causes metabolic problems that accumulate into severe symptoms.

The conglomerates that invested in the technology created the rehabilitation centers in China and lobbied to change the labor laws to institutionalize the idea of “rehabilitation”—and so hide the truth.

They discovered that those suffering from the side effects of time sense dilation and those suffering from the side effects of time sense compression can help one another, be one another’s cure.

“I’m the yang to your yin, is that it?” So her interest in me is limited to my value as a medical device. My middle-aged male ego is hurt.

“Sure, if you insist on thinking about it that way.” Her tone, at least, is compassionate.

“What about the donkey-braying music?”

“It’s a way to harmonize our biorhythms.”

I wait for her to stroke my ego by telling me that compared to her previous rehabilitation biorhythm partners, I’m better looking, more interesting, more special, etc. But she says nothing of the kind.

“What about the dogs?” I’m running out of things to say before she leaves.

“They started out as regular dogs. But because they’re exposed to so many patients with out-of-sync senses of time, the structures in their brains have changed.”

“I have only one last wish.” I stare at her bright eyes, like a pair of fireflies, in the darkness. “Come and look at the fish in the waterways with me. Maybe they’re the only creatures in this world who live real lives.”

The fireflies brighten. She touches my face lightly. “Actually…”

I silence her lips with my fingers. I shake my head. I’ve succeeded. There’s no need for her to tell me what she’s going to tell me, the three heaviest words in the world.

But she gently moves my hand away, and says three words, three different words.

“Don’t be stupid.”

I’m alone by the waterway, staring at the fish.

She’s gone, leaving behind no way to contact her. Sand pricks my palms. No matter how hard I squeeze, it slips away.

Fish, oh, fish, you’re the only ones left to keep me company.

Suddenly I feel an intense jealousy of these fish. Their lives are so simple, so pure. There’s only one direction—against the current. They do not have to hesitate, overwhelmed by an endless array of choices. But if I really lived a life like that, maybe I’d still complain. A man is never content with what he has.

Suddenly I want to spit at myself for my self-love, self-pity, self-obsession, self-self. But in the end I do nothing.

I look at one single fish: it’s pushed away from its school by the current. Once, twice, thrice. It falls behind, waves its tail madly, and returns to its position.

Fuck. It’s tough.

But wait.

Why is it always this one fish? Why are its trajectory and movement always exactly the same?

I wait, unblinking.

Two minutes later, that same little fish again drifts away from the school, again waves its tail madly, again returns to its position.

I lift the stone in my hand.

The stone falls through the holographic fish and sinks to the bottom of the waterway.

I have nothing left in my hand, not even a single grain of sand.

My rehabilitation over, I’m on my return flight with my not-so-healthy mind and not-so-happy body. The airplane hasn’t taken off yet, but the cabin is already filled with snores.

I guess some people at least have been fully rehabilitated.

Suddenly the idea of returning to that concrete jungle to struggle against my fellow time-compressors disgusts me.

The plane takes off. Cities, roads, mountains, rivers—everything recedes into a small chessboard composed of parti-colored squares. In every square, time flows faster or slower. The people below throng like a nest of ants controlled by an invisible hand, divide into a few groups, are stuffed into the different squares: time flies past the laborer, the poor, the “third world”; time crawls for the rich, the idle, the “developed world”; time stays still for those in charge, the idols, the gods…

Without warning, two fat hands belonging to a child appear before me, balled into fists side by side, holding the entire world.

“Left or right?”

I look to the left and then to the right. I’m frightened. I have no way to pick.

Mocking laughter.

I lunge and grab both fists and force the fingers open. Both are empty, both are lies.

“Sir, sir!”

The pretty flight attendant wakes me. Now I finally remember the origin of that dream. It was my cousin who tormented me as a child. His favorite game was to force me to guess in which hand he had hidden the candy he took away from me. He loved to tease me because I was always hesitant, always had trouble deciding.

“Sir, would you like soda, coffee, tea, or something else?”

“…you.”

She blushes.

I smile at her. “I just want coffee, black.”

This is the only truly free choice I have left.

THE FLOWER OF SHAZUI

Summers in Shenzhen Bay last ten months. Mangrove swamps surround the bay like congealed blood. Year after year, they shrink and rot like the rust-colored night that hides many crimes.

To the east of the mangroves, north of Huanggang Port between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, is Shazui Village, where I’m staying for now.

I’ve hidden here for half a year. The subtropical sun is brutal, but I’ve grown even paler. The five urban villages, Shazui, Shatou, Shawei, Shangsha, and Xiasha—or literally, “Sand Mouth,” “Sand Head,” “Sand Tail,” “Upper Sand,” “Lower Sand”—form a large, dense concrete jungle at the heart of Futian District. The names of the villages often give one the illusion of living in the mouth of some giant, mythical monster named “Sand” which, while separated from the head, remains alive.

Big Sister Shen tells me this used to be a sleepy fishing village. But with the economic reforms and the opening up of China, urbanization brought construction everywhere. To get more compensation when the government exercised its eminent domain powers, villagers raced to build tall towers on their land so as to maximize the square footage of the residential space. But before they could cash in, real estate prices had risen to the point where even the government could no longer afford to pay compensation. These hastily erected buildings remain like historical ruins, witnesses to history.

“The villagers built a story every three days,” she says. “Now that’s what you call the Speed of the Special Economic Zone.”

I imagine these buildings growing as fast as cancer cells, finally settling into the form they have today. Inside the apartments, it’s always dark because there’s so little space between the buildings that tenants in buildings next to each other can shake hands through the windows. The alleyways are narrow like capillaries and follow no discernible pattern. The stench of rot and decay permeates everything, sinks into everyone’s pores. Because the rent is cheap, every kind of migrant can be found here, struggling to fulfill their Shenzhen dream: the high-tech, high-salaried, high-resolution, high-life, high-Shenzhen.

But I prefer this lower-end version. It makes me feel safer.

Big Sister Shen is a good person. She’s originally from the Northeast. Years ago, she bought this building from a native family that was moving overseas. Now she lives the life of a happy landlady. With the rent rising daily, her net worth must be in the tens of millions, but she still lives here. She took me in despite the fact that I had no identity papers, and gave me a small booth to practice my trade. She even prepared a fake file for me in case the police ever show up. She never asks me about my past. I’m grateful, and I try to do a few favors to repay her.

From my booth at the door of the Chinese medicine shop, I sell a combination of body films and cracked versions of augmented-reality software. Body films are applied to the skin, where they display words or pictures in response to the body’s electrical signals. In America, they use the technology as a diagnostic tool, monitoring patients’ physiological signs. But here it has become part of the street culture of status display. Laborers, gangsters, and prostitutes all like to apply the films to prominent or hidden parts of the body so that, in response to changing muscle tension or skin temperature, the films can show various pictures to signal the wearer’s personality, daring, and sex appeal.

I still remember the first time I spoke with Snow Lotus.

Snow Lotus is from humid, subtropical Hunan, but she decided to name herself after an alpine flower. Even at night, her pale skin glows like porcelain. Some say that she’s Shazui Village’s most famous “house phoenix”—a prostitute who works out of her home. I often see her walking and holding hands with different men, but her expression is always composed, with no hint that anything sordid is going on. Indeed, she exudes an allure that makes it impossible to look away.

Shazui Village is home to thousands of prostitutes at all price levels. They provide the middle- and lower-class men of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong with all varieties of plentiful, cheap sexual services. Their bodies are like a paradise where the tired, dirty, and fragile male souls can take temporary refuge. Or maybe they are like a shot of placebo so that the men, after a moment of joy, their spirit restored, can return to the battlefield that is real life.

Snow Lotus is not like any of the others. She’s Big Sister Shen’s good friend and comes often to shop at the Chinese medicine store. Every time she passes my booth, her perfume makes my heart skip a few beats. I always try to restrain myself from following her with my eyes, but I never succeed.

That day, Snow Lotus tapped my shoulder lightly from behind. “Can you help me fix my body film? It won’t light up,” she said.

“I can take a look.” I had trouble hiding my rising panic.

“Follow me,” she whispered.

The dim stairs were as narrow as intestines. Her apartment was nothing like what I had imagined. The color scheme was light yellow, decorated with many homey, warm details. There was even a balcony that allowed one to see the open sky. In Shazui, this was a real luxury.

She led me into her bedroom, and, keeping her back to me, she slid her jeans down to her knees, revealing a pair of blindingly white thighs and lacy black panties.

My hands and feet felt cold. I swallowed with difficulty, trying to moisten my dry throat.

Snow Lotus’s elegant finger pointed to her panties. I was still not ready. My heart was full of fear.

“It won’t light up,” she said. She hadn’t taken off her panties. She was just pointing to the octagon-shaped film depicting a bagua that had been applied right above her tailbone.

I tried to disguise my disappointment. Carefully, I examined the film with my diagnostic tools, doing my best not to pay attention to her smooth, silky skin. I tweaked the thermal response curve of the capacitance detector. “It should be okay now. Try it.” I let out a long-held breath.

Suddenly Snow Lotus began to laugh. The almost-invisible hairs on the smooth skin below her waist stood up like a miniature patch of reeds.

“How am I supposed to try it out?” She turned around to look at me, her tone teasing.

I believe that no straight man in the world can resist that look. But in that moment, I felt insulted. She was treating me as just another customer, a consumer who exchanged money for the right to make use of her body. Or perhaps she thought that this was how she’d pay for my services? I didn’t know where my childish anger came from, but without saying another word, I took out a heating pad and held it against her waist. After thirty seconds, the yin-yang symbol in middle of the bagua lit up with the character for “east,” glowing with a blue light.

“East?” I asked, not understanding.

“That’s my man’s name.” Snow Lotus’s expression was back to being calm and composed. She pulled up her jeans, turned around, and saw the question on my face. “You think a prostitute should have no man to call hers?

“He likes to take me from behind. I put the film here to let all my customers know they can mount me if they’re willing to spend the money, but there are some things they cannot buy.” She lit a cigarette. “Oh, how much do I owe you?”

I felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of relief.

The man named East is Snow Lotus’s husband, and also her pimp. His business involves traveling between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, smuggling digital goods. Others tell me that he’s addicted to gambling. Most of Snow Lotus’s earnings are lost by him at the gaming table. Sometimes he even forces her to service some older Hong Kong customers with… special desires. But even so, she still wears his name on her waist, declaring that she belongs to him.

This is such a cliché that it reminds me of many old Hong Kong gangster movies. But that’s just daily life in Shazui.

Snow Lotus is unhappy. That’s why she often comes to Big Sister Shen for help.

Like many in Shazui, Big Sister Shen also has multiple jobs. One of them is shaman.

Big Sister Shen claims to be a Manchu. Some of her ancestors were also shamans, she says, and so she has inherited some of their magical powers, enabling her to speak to spirits and to predict the future.

One time, when she was a little drunk and in a talkative mood, she described the great, empty deserts of the far north, where one’s breath turned to ice, and where her ancestors had once performed magical ceremonies while dressed in ferocious masks, dancing, twirling in the blizzard, drumming and singing, praying for spirits to take over their bodies. Even though that was a hot day, with the temperature hovering near forty degrees Celsius, everyone in the room had shivered as she told her story.

Big Sister Shen never allows me to enter the room where she performs her magic. She says that because I don’t want anything, my heart isn’t pure, and so I will harm the atmosphere for the spirits.

An endless stream of customers comes to seek her services. They all say that she has real power—one look, and she can tell everything about you. I’ve seen the people who leave her room after the magic sessions: their faces are filled with a dreamy look of satisfaction.

I’ve seen that expression many times: young women carrying their LV Speedy bags, wealthy urbanites on the hunt for beautiful women at the V Bar of the Venetian, politicians who appear on TV every night for the six-thirty Shenzhen news—all of them wear that same expression on their faces, a very Shenzhen expression.

They are like the johns who come to Shazui every day. They go to the Chinese medicine store for some extra-strength aphrodisiac and then reappear with a confident smile. But I know that the aphrodisiac contains nothing but fiber, and it has no effect except causing them to shit regular.

In this city, everyone needs some placebo.

Snow Lotus comes to Big Sister Shen again and again. Each time she leaves as if enlightened, but soon after, she returns, her face full of unhappiness. I can imagine the kind of troubles that someone like her must endure, but I can’t help wanting to know more. I have many technical ways to satisfy my curiosity, but they all require that I set foot first in Big Sister Shen’s room. I know the only way is to become a disciple.

“I need the aid of spirits,” I tell Big Sister Shen. I’m not lying.

“Come in.” Big Sister Shen has seen countless men. She can spot a liar from a mile away.

The room isn’t big, and it’s dimly lit. On the wall I can see paintings of shamanistic spirits, the chaotic brushstrokes probably the result of a drug-addled brain. Big Sister Shen sits in front of a square altar covered by a red flannel cloth. On top of the altar are a mask, a cowhide drum, a drum whip, a bronze mirror, a bronze bell, and other ritual implements. An electronic prayer machine begins to recite sutras. She puts on the mask, and through the hideous eyeholes, I can see an ancient and alien light in her eyes.

“The Great Spirit is listening,” she says. Her voice is low and rasping, full of an indisputable sense of dignity.

I can’t resist her power. There’s a story locked away in the darkest corner of my memory, but it has never ceased to torment me. Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent.

Suddenly I startle awake. My subconscious has been playing a trick on me. It’s not curiosity about Snow Lotus that caused me to step into this room, but the inner desire to be free of repression, to seek relief.

“I’m from outside the Fence. I was an engineer.” I try to control my breathing, to steady my voice.

I’m from outside the Fence. I was an engineer.

Back in 1983, before I was born, a barbed-wire fence 84.6 kilometers long and 2.8 meters high was built to divide Shenzhen into two parts. Inside the Fence is the 327.5 square kilometers of the Special Economic Zone; outside is a wilderness of 1,600 square kilometers. They say that the purpose of the Fence was to provide some relief for the border checkpoint between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Before 1997, when Hong Kong was ruled by Great Britain, there used to be many waves of illegal border crossings.

The Berlin Wall never truly fell.

The Fence and its nine checkpoints separated not only people and traffic, but also different systems of law, welfare, tax benefits, infrastructure, and identity. The area outside the Fence became Shenzhen’s “mistress.” Because of its proximity to the Special Economic Zone and its vast tracts of undeveloped land, it attracted many labor-intensive, though low-value-added, industries. But every time “outside the Fence” was mentioned, a Shenzhener’s first thought was of the deserts in Hollywood westerns: a poor, backward place where the roads were always under construction, where running red lights had no consequences, where crime was rampant and the police powerless.

Yet history always surprises us with similarities. Shenzhen also had its own version of the taming of the West.

In 2014, the government’s decision to finally tear down the Fence received unprecedented opposition. Shenzheners living inside the Fence believed that they would be overwhelmed by migrants from the other side and suffer increased crime. But those living outside the Fence opposed it even more. They felt that they had been abandoned by those inside the Fence back when the Special Economic Zone grew, and now that development had run into a wall due to the scarcity of developable space, they were being exploited for their only resource: land. If unopposed, increased rent and prices would drive the low-income population out of their homes. Young people even dressed up in Native American garb and tied themselves to the Fence to prevent it from being torn down.

The factory where I worked was one of the electronics manufacturers affected by the change. Every year we relied on orders from Europe, America, and Japan for augmented reality gear components to earn foreign currency. At the same time, our margins were being squeezed by the declining value of the dollar against the yuan. If commercial rent and wages also rose, then there would be nothing left for profit. The owner announced at an all-hands meeting that everyone should be prepared for layoffs.

I was a mold engineer. I wanted to do something to make as much money as I could before I was let go. Everyone thought that way.

Our clients gave us prototypes for unreleased products so we could design the molds ahead of actual production. Following strict NDAs and security procedures, RFID chips embedded in the prototypes sent out signals at 433 MHz and communicated with dedicated receivers through a proprietary over-the-air protocol. If at any time a prototype left a designated area, an automatic alarm would sound. If the prototype weren’t returned to the designated area within three hundred seconds, the machine would activate a self-destructive mechanism. Of course, if that were to occur, the factory would lose all international credibility and be blacklisted by clients and get no more business.

Throughout the Pearl River Delta, experienced and crafty buyers solicited secret prototypes at high prices. Getting their hands on such prototypes and reverse engineering them would bring these shanzhai electronics manufacturers tens of millions in profits. These days, getting rich unethically was easier than running an honest business.

I had lined up everything: a willing buyer, a price, a way to deliver the goods, and an escape route. But I still needed one more thing, a helper, someone to divert the attention of the crowd and lure away the security guards. I couldn’t think of anyone better for the job than Chen Gan, who was also from my hometown.

I understood Chen Gan. He was a shy young man. His wife had just given birth to their second daughter, and he was worried about how he would be able to afford his first daughter’s elementary school tuition. As a migrant, he could not have his household registration in Shenzhen and had to pay an extra fee for his daughter to go to the regular school. Without that money, he would have to send his daughter to a different school, a low-quality place set up for the children of migrant workers. He would often look at a picture of his little girl and say that he didn’t want her to repeat the path he had walked.

I made a deposit into his bank account: not too much, just enough to cover the extra fee for the school.

For the Chinese, what reason could be more compelling than “for my child”?

At the agreed-upon time, I heard the sound of loudspeakers outside my building. I knew that Chen Gan was already playing his role. In the middle of the yard, he had covered himself in gasoline and held a lighter in his hand. He declared that if the owner didn’t pay him enough severance, then he would light himself on fire. As security guards rushed anxiously into the yard with fire extinguishers, no one paid attention as I took the emergency stairs up to the roof, clutching the stolen prototype.

I was one of only five individuals in the factory authorized to touch the prototype. Taking advantage of opportunities afforded by my duties, I had tested the RFID trigger mechanism several times. The logs appeared to only record the latitude and longitude of the device, but not the altitude. This hole allowed me to devise an effective method of delivery to the buyer.

On the roof, the wind blew strong and cold, like the moment before the first drops of rain. Almost all the workers in the factory had congregated in the yard to watch how the self-immolation drama would end. If the owner gave in to Chen Gan’s demands, tomorrow hundreds more would be waiting for him, doused in gasoline.

But I’d known the owner for three years. He was the sort who would encourage Chen Gan to go ahead and use the lighter, and then he would light a cigarette from the smoldering pile of ash.

A dragonfly-like remote-controlled helicopter approached from afar, humming, and landed on the roof. Following directions, I tied the prototype to the bottom of the helicopter. Unsteadily, it began to rise. I anxiously watched this fragile machine, on which the lives of two men, and perhaps of even more, depended.

The maximum communication distance between the RFID chip and the receiver was about sixty feet. The roof was already close to that limit.

The helicopter hung in the air as if waiting for more direction. I didn’t know how the buyers intended to deal with the self-destructive mechanism or if they were going to crack the communication protocol and substitute in a false signal to fool the device. That was all beyond what I could control.

For a moment, I thought the helicopter might never leave. But it did eventually depart the roof, and then disappeared into the gray sky.

Calmly, I rode the elevator down and squeezed myself into the gaping crowd. I made sure that Chen Gan saw me. He nodded almost imperceptibly, gave me his trademark shy smile, and dropped the lighter.

The security guards were on him immediately and wrestled him to the ground.

It was time to leave, I thought.

I got on the intercity bus to Dongguan. But before the bus had even started its engine, my phone began to vibrate insistently. Given what I knew about the owner, I never would have had much time. But I hadn’t expected to be caught so quickly.

Maybe it was the closed-circuit cameras, or maybe Chen Gan sold me out. But I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted him to be all right, to live long enough to see his daughter go to school.

I threw away my phone, got off the bus, and got on the bus going the opposite direction, inside the Fence, into Shenzhen. Instinctively, I knew that was the safer direction.

This was how I came to be in Shazui Village.

For the last half year, I’ve tried every which way to find out news about Chen Gan, but have heard nothing. I thought I was sufficiently indifferent, indifferent to the point that I could abandon my useless conscience. But often I would awaken in the middle of the night, breathless. In my dreams, Chen Gan, smiling his shy smile, would burn and turn into a pile of ashes. Sometimes I would even dream of his two daughters, crying, burning with him, also turning into ash.

I knew that I could no longer hide from myself.

“Please tell me if he’s all right.” My face is covered in tears even though I don’t remember crying.

The wooden shaman mask glowers at me with its round eyeholes, orange light reflecting off the surface. The face is that of an angry goddess. Through the eyeholes I can see a strange glint in her eyes: sparkling blue flashes, very high in frequency.

Suddenly I understand. The mask is nothing more than a fucking well-made disguise for a pair of augmented reality glasses.

All this time, I’ve thought that Big Sister Shen is just a fraud pretending to be a medium and making her money by telling her clients what they want to hear. But she actually has real power. Guessing conservatively, her information privilege level must be set to at least level IIA or above, giving her the power to access an individual’s private file based on facial recognition.

But even so, without professional-grade analysis filter software, how can she glean any useful information out of that torrent within such a short time? It would be like finding a needle lost in the sea. I can only credit her shaman genes, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man being able to tell how many matches are in a box with a single glance.

The lights behind the eyeholes flash faster. My heart accelerates.

“He’s doing well.”

Hope rekindles in my heart.

“At least there, he no longer needs to worry about money.” Big Sister Shen points toward the sky. Then she adds, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

I suck in a deep breath. Even though I was expecting it, now that the fear has settled into reality, I still feel a deep helplessness. The whole world seems to have lost focus, and nothing can be relied on.

I know that in this world, there’s only one thing I can do to try to atone, even if it will provide only illusory comfort for my conscience.

“I want a working bank account number for Chen Gan’s family.”

Money was once my placebo. Now I no longer need it.

It’s dark by the time I leave Big Sister Shen’s room. I look around at Shazui, where lights are just being turned on behind windows. People are bustling every which way, filling the air with hope. But my heart is like a dead pool of water. I open my hand. Emptiness.

My subconscious has played another trick on me. I did indeed install the bug below the rim of the altar. I thought I was there for Chen Gan, but in the end I couldn’t forget about Snow Lotus.

I smile, a Shenzhen-style smile.

Snow Lotus doesn’t look well.

Her face is pale. She’s wearing large shades that cover her eyes and half her face. Without speaking to anyone, she goes straight to Big Sister Shen’s room.

I put on my headset and turn on the receiver. After a static-filled moment, I hear the sound of the electronic prayer machine.

“He hit me again.” Snow Lotus’s voice is tearful. “He said that I haven’t been turning enough tricks. He needs more money.”

“This is your own choice.” Big Sister Shen’s voice is calm, as if she’s used to hearing this.

“I should go with that Hong Kong businessman.”

“But you don’t want to leave him.”

“I’ve been with him for ten years! Ten years! I was once a girl who didn’t know anything, and now… I’m nothing but a cheap whore!”

“You want another ten years just like these?”

“Big Sister… I’m pregnant.”

Big Sister Shen is quiet for a moment. “Is it his?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell him. You’re bearing his child. You cannot be a whore anymore.”

“He’ll tell me to abort it. This is not the first time. Big Sister, I’m getting old. I want to keep this child.”

“Then keep it.”

“He’ll kill me. He will.”

“He won’t,” I say.

Hearing your own voice from the air as well as the headset is a very odd sensation. I’m standing at the door to the room, watching a surprised Snow Lotus turning to look at me. Her face is as smooth as porcelain, except for her swollen, bruised right eye. My fists are squeezed so tight that the nails puncture my skin.

Here’s my plan. Even though it’s against my original aim, I have to admit that it’s the most likely to succeed.

Her husband is addicted to gambling. He’s also like every other gambler under the sun: superstitious. We need to allow him to make a connection between his child and good luck. For my child. My heart feels a tinge of bitterness.

Every morning, Snow Lotus will mumble a string of meaningless numbers as if talking in her sleep.

Her obsessive husband habitually seeks inspiration for his bets from anything, whether it’s the colors of the Teletubbies or the phone number on advertising brochures. Then he’ll discover that she’s mumbling the winning lottery numbers from the day before.

Snow Lotus will tell him that she had a strange dream: she dreamed that a beautiful rainbow-colored cloud floated out of the east and drifted into her belly.

After seven days of this, we’ll come to the best part of the show.

My professional skills will finally come into use. I’ll arm Snow Lotus with wireless earbuds and augmented reality contact lenses. But the key will be a special black unitard. At first glance, it looks like regular long underwear, but specially designed fibers will deform and harden when electrically charged, resulting in precisely defined areas of tension and force, strong enough to stop a bullet.

With the addition of an array of electrodes and a communication chip, I can turn the unitard into a remote-controlled puppet suit, allowing me to pose the wearer in any position.

“Why do you want to help me?” Snow Lotus asks. She still thinks that men are only interested in her body.

“For karma.” I laugh. Big Sister Shen often says this to her customers. With the remote control, I direct the unitard-wearing Snow Lotus into various sexy poses.

“Without any clothes, I can pose even better.”

I lower my head, pretending not to hear. I continue to fiddle with the controls. Suddenly, like a warm cloud descending from the sky, two soft, pale arms are wrapped around my chest. Her voice is against my back, fills my chest, my heart, my lungs, flows up my spine into my eardrums. The voice seems to come from the bottom of my heart, and also seems to come from very far away.

“Thank you,” she says.

I want to say something, but in the end I say nothing.

Big Sister Shen and I are seeing what Snow Lotus is seeing.

After the dim stairs, we come to the familiar pale yellow apartment. The man named East is sitting in front of the TV, watching horse races in Hong Kong, cursing all the while. Snow Lotus walks into the kitchen, preparing to make dinner.

The picture suddenly becomes still. Then a man’s two arms are wrapped around her breasts, like the way she had held me.

“Don’t,” she says.

The man does not answer. The picture suddenly shakes, and now her face is close to the faucet, her head lowered into the sink. The faucet is on, and the water rises, covering the vegetables and the fruits before draining into the overflow hole with tiny bubbles. Now the picture begins to shake rhythmically. Then come the heavy breathing, sighing, and the occasional moaning.

I can turn off the video and audio feed, but I don’t. I observe all this almost grimly, experiencing a mixture of anger, jealousy, and disgust churning slowly in the pit of my stomach until they merge into a single feeling. I struggle to imagine what Snow Lotus is feeling, especially since she is not making a sound, not a single sound, while all this is happening under the gaze of two outsiders.

Finally she finds some relief. She closes her eyes.

In the semidarkness, blurry patches of light penetrate her eyelids and tremble lightly. A hand is on my shoulder. It’s Big Sister Shen. She sees and knows all.

We wait until midnight. I can hear even, rhythmic snores coming from next to Snow Lotus. I lift her left hand, indicating that I’m ready. She clears her throat in response.

Now begins the fake séance.

I manipulate the puppet suit and lift her legs high up; then I make her torso rigid and drop her legs, using them as a lever to lift her upper body off the bed. I let her body drop, bouncing her legs even higher. Switching thus between potential and kinetic energy, the rigid body of Snow Lotus soon behaves like a coin striking hard ground, quickly bouncing and making a frightening ruckus against the bed.

“What the fuck is the matter with you? It’s the middle of the night!” The man named East, rudely roused from slumber, feels for the bedside lamp and turns it on. Then, with another great noise, East is bounced off the bed onto the floor.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” His curses are full of fear and shock.

As she continues to bounce, Snow Lotus’s body seems to no longer be restrained by gravity. She is like a puppet pulled up by invisible strings. Up, down, up again, she springs from the mattress. For a moment, she seems to be floating in air. The yellow ceiling comes closer, and then recedes, like some kind of breathing membrane. The edges of our vision show signs of barrel distortion as the membrane relaxes.

“That’s enough.” Big Sister Shen puts a stop to my madness. Our goal isn’t to scare this man away.

I have to admit that controlling Snow Lotus’s body is addictive, as though it compensates for something subconsciously.

The amplitude of the bounces lessens. Snow Lotus’s body is once again quietly lying in bed. I relax the fibers in the puppet suit. Now she is spread out like a floppy corpse.

Just like we planned, she begins to cry. Babbling incoherently, she describes her nightmare and the strange news.

“It… it says that if we take care of it, it will repay us, like with those lottery numbers…”

“Who is it?”

“Your child.”

The man gets up from the floor. His face is wooden, as though he has been overwhelmed with too much information. He holds in his hands a fruit knife that he grabbed from somewhere. Approaching Snow Lotus, he caresses her belly, and then lifts his head to gaze into her face. Under the warm glow of the lamp, this seems like a happy scene from a soap opera. Next will come the promise to welcome new life, followed by the deep kiss of love.

The glimmer in his beautiful eyes suddenly turns cold, dark, like a pool of black water.

“The doctor told me that my sperm is no good.” Slowly he rubs the flat of the knife across her belly. “Now tell me whose bastard this is. Then get rid of it.”

“It’s yours.” Snow Lotus’s breathing is now very rapid. Her voice trembles on the verge of tears.

“You think you’re the Blessed Virgin Mary? You fucking whore!” He slaps her hard. The picture tilts. The dressing mirror shows two silhouettes. The composition is perfect in the dim light.

“It’s yours,” she repeats, her voice weak.

The knife is now right in front of her face, the thin, sharp edge glowing with a cold light. I can no longer sit and watch. I lift Snow Lotus’s hands, grab the man’s wrist and the knife handle, and turn the knife around. He’s unprepared for her speed and strength and doesn’t know how to react.

Snow Lotus’s entire body leans forward, pushing the tip of the knife toward her husband’s chest.

“Stop!” Big Sister Shen yells. But I’m not doing anything. It’s Snow Lotus. I don’t even have a chance to restrain her.

The knife, with all of Snow Lotus’s weight behind it, sinks into the man’s skin, through muscle and ribs, through his heart. Crimson liquid oozes out of the wound and spreads like wildflowers. He looks up, gazing past Snow Lotus as though he sees an existence even darker, further away, until the last light of life disappears from his eyes.

The picture stays still for a while. Stunned by the sudden turn of events, we don’t know what to do. Snow Lotus suddenly begins to run. Everything in front of us is shaking violently. She runs toward the balcony, toward that patch of open night sky.

This time I don’t miss. Before she leaps into nothingness, I restrain her. Snow Lotus stops like a frozen flower and falls heavily against the floor. Angrily she screams, struggles, and finally howls in desperation.

Death is the best placebo.

In this instance, I agree with this view.

Sirens shatter the dawn in Shazui Village. Accompanied by the police, Big Sister Shen and I walk through the crowd and duck into the police car. Snow Lotus is sitting in the back of another car, handcuffed. From the side, her porcelain cheeks are lit alternately by flashes of blue and red. She does not lift her head.

Eyes lowered, the roar of the engine in her ears, her silhouette trembles, blurs, and then disappears into the distance.

I recall the first time I spoke with Snow Lotus, and I begin down the long road of regret.